Mr. Denis Egan:

If I could just add to that, as somebody who has been involved in most of the appeals and referrals, we are fortunate that the chairman of our appeals body in one of our two divisions is a former Supreme Court judge and the other chairman is a judge in the Circuit Court. I will refer to one recent appeal case, but I will not mention it by name. Unfortunately, however what is now happening in the Turf Club in relation to appeals is more akin to what goes on in the High Court and the Supreme Court. The first hearing of the case to which I refer had a 19 page written judgment. When the case went to appeal, there was another 20 page judgment on three preliminary points. The final decision was handed down a few weeks ago and the judgment will be published in the next weeks or so. Again it is a document of ten to 15 pages with references to High Court cases, standards of proof and whether the Turf Club has jurisdiction in different places. It has become a legal minefield.

If the committee has to sit in judgment on whether interference in a race affected the placings, that is not a major difficulty, but there are cases that are more and more litigious and anything in legislation that could impact on the way we carry out our role could indirectly impact on that. We would not welcome that.

Senator O'Brien made a point on cost savings. I tried to answer that question in my response to Deputy Heydon. Senator O'Brien asked also whether entries and silks have anything to do with the rules of racing. Silks are not a major issue from our point of view but entries have a major bearing on us. Let us suppose that the proposed directives are introduced and that, for example, horse racing entries and declarations become governed by a directive as opposed to a rule of racing. If a horse which is not qualified to run in a race gets into that race, how will the horse be disqualified? HRI does not have a disciplinary function so it must be governed by a rule of racing whereby it can appear in front of one of our committees and be dealt with. The current legislation works fine. If any party applies to HRI for registration and is turned down, he or she has the right of appeal to the Turf Club appeal body. There is a structure in place that works very well at present.